by Jade West
Mr Roberts the man wanted to taste Helen Palmer’s dirty fantasies. Every single one of them. Every single part of her.
The girl was working her way inside my very soul, and her eyes showed not the slightest hint of calculated sorcery, nor the slightest hint of the tenacious little vixen Anna had warned me against. I could feel Helen Palmer in my bones, in my veins, her soft breaths ricocheting around my brain. Yet, she seemed to have not the slightest idea. Not the slightest clue.
Innocent. The girl was innocent.
Yet her sketches were anything but.
I closed my eyes to blank out her image, and then I forced Mr Roberts the teacher back to the fore. I took my hands away, and as I did her body moved with me, just a fraction, but enough to know that her flesh wanted mine.
“This way,” I said, already moving, trying to ignore my stiffening cock, concentrating on nothing but the landscape, breathing in the outdoors as though nature itself could cleanse my dirty soul.
Helen knew we’d reached our destination before I announced it, a visible haven amidst the farmland, an oasis of babbling water and rock, edged with mature trees. The brook dipped sharply in this spot, tumbling over the ledge to form a miniature waterfall, from which it danced across the shallows and the pebbles before snaking its way through the trees. This place was a suntrap, catching a perfect sliver of daylight before the sun dipped behind the hill. The trees whispered overhead, as though they were talking about us. About me. About the bulge in my trousers and my tenuous grip on morality.
My usual perch was waiting. A slab of slate, positioned like it had been designed for me, and had always been that way. It was perfectly flat on top and big enough for two, and once upon a time there had been two. I never sat in Anna’s space, even now. Sometimes I liked to close my eyes and pretend she was still beside me. Sometimes I even convinced myself I could hear her voice on the wind. I sat myself down and watched Helen soaking in the scenery with a smile on her face.
“Wow,” she said, and took a few steps along the brook, turning on the spot over and over, taking in the whole vista. “Mr Roberts, this is beautiful… really beautiful…”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“…it’s like something from a novel… something secret and wild… and magical…” She ran her fingers over the bark of my favourite old oak tree. “Yes… magical… that’s it… this place is so alive…”
“Yes, it is.” I took out a cigarette, cupped my hand against the breeze to light it.
“Is it yours?” she asked. “Is this your place?”
“Technically not, no.” I beckoned her closer, until she was at my side, then patted Anna’s space with a lurch in my stomach. Helen took a tentative seat, and she was close, just like Anna would have been. I pointed to the brow of the hill opposite, through the trees, where you could just make out the corner of my studio jutting from the foliage. “That’s my place, but I’ve been coming here ever since I moved in, and nobody’s ever argued it.”
“Then it’s a secret.” Her eyes were smiling. “A secret place.”
“This place has heard a lot of my secrets.”
“And you’ve heard a lot of mine…” She looked away, and there was that little bloom of her cheeks again. A delicate shyness that only stoked the flames. “Maybe one day I’ll hear some of yours, now that we’re… friends… maybe… I guess we’re friends, right? Are we really friends, Mr Roberts?”
Brave, brave little Helen Palmer. Even in the face of her nerves she had spirit. I was coming to love her little outpourings, the beauty in her sweet little confessions. Her eyes were brimming with reverence, and it made me feel good, made me feel wanted, made me feel like a man again.
“You don’t know me, Helen. If you did, then maybe you wouldn’t be so keen to be friends,” I laughed to lighten my words. “Maybe I’d bore you. Maybe you’d find my ways to your distaste.”
“I would still want to know you,” she said, unfazed. “Maybe I don’t know things about you, not in the way I know Lizzie, or Katie, or my mum and dad, but there is more to knowing someone than that.”
I felt chastised, and it amused me. “What makes you so confident you want a man like me?” I shocked myself with my choice of words, and Helen’s eyes widened. “To be friends with a man like me,” I corrected, but it was too late. The corner of Helen’s lip was pinched between her teeth, the expression of concentration I knew so well from class. Her gaze drifted towards my cottage as she formulated her response.
“It’s more than knowing things,” she said. “Do you believe in the soul?”
“In a form, yes, I think so. Do you?” I offered her my cigarette and she took it from my fingers like a hummingbird. I barely felt her touch.
I watched her take a breath, and the light breeze curled the smoke from her mouth to mine. I breathed it in, tasted it.
“Yes,” she said. “I believe in the soul. Not in a churchy way or anything like that, I just… I feel things… moods… people… not in my mind, but deeper, in my heart, or sometimes my stomach…” She took another drag. “I feel things, and I see things, and through them I feel like I know them… things that I paint… things that I sense…” She handed back my cigarette and watched me place it between my lips. “I guess I’m not making any sense.”
“On the contrary,” I said. “You’re making sense. Perfect abstract sense. You’re talking about intuition, and instinct, and that ethereal perception of the world us artists are often blessed with.” I smiled. “Or cursed. It depends how you look at it.”
“Blessed,” she said. “Art is a blessing.”
“Art, yes, but emotional sensitivity, the quest for the intangible, the meaning in everything, the beauty in everything. That can sometimes be a curse.” I stubbed out my cigarette in the dip of rock I always used as an ashtray. “It can be a lonely path.”
She pushed her hair behind her ears and nodded. “Yes… it can.”
“So, tell me, intuitive one, what does your soul say about a man like me?”
Her heels tapped against the rock, a steady rhythm as she pondered. “You’re smart,” she said. “And you’re considered. I see you thinking… when you’re thinking your eyebrows tense up, just a little. You think before you speak, most of the time, anyway. You take this little pause before you answer a question, like you want to be sure. A little breath, and you often tilt your head.”
“I didn’t know I tensed my eyebrows, or tilted my head.”
“You do. Not weirdly or anything, just a bit.” She laughed, a delightful girly sound. “I do this with everyone, don’t worry. I notice everyone.”
“What else have you noticed?”
“Your patience. You are calm, and kind, even when people aren’t listening, even when you’re angry, you’re still calm. You still have time for people, even the idiots. I feel your frustration sometimes, but you don’t show it, you’re always calm. You always want the best for people, even when they don’t want it for themselves, don’t you? Is that why you became a teacher?”
“Partly.” The wind caught her hair and blew it around my shoulder, and again I caught the scent of apple shampoo. “I’m not always calm and patient, Helen. Just at school. It’s my job to be calm and patient.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe you. You’re just trying to put yourself down so I don’t think you’re so great anymore.”
I smiled. “Is that so?”
She nodded. “It won’t work, though. My heart knows otherwise.”
“Your heart knows me that well, does it?” And mine sped up, a ridiculous reaction to a young girl’s observations.
“Well, my heart, my soul, whatever you want to call it.” Her eyes fixed on mine, and beneath the nerves there was steadfast honesty. “Sometimes I see you’re sad, like I get sad. Sometimes I see you watching the rain through the window, when everyone’s busy around you, and you act like it’s nothing, but I feel it… something… it tickles my stomach… makes it
lurch like I’m falling… like it does when I feel sad, too.”
And my stomach lurched. “Everyone gets sad at some point.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t take her eyes away. “Maybe it’s just my imagination.”
“Maybe you’ve got a little too much intuition for your own good.” I tapped the side of her head with my finger. “You should put this to better use, you’ve got more important things to be worrying about than my sadness.”
“But you’re worried about mine…” she whispered. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Because I said I was lonely. Because you heard me…” Tap, tap, tap went her heels. “Maybe I heard you, too…” I looked away, far into the distance, and she took it to mean I was displeased, I could hear the tension in her breath. “I’m sorry, I was wrong… stupid me… it’s nothing… just an overactive imagination. My dad says I have to keep my feet on the ground, he says I’m away with the fairies, making up loads of stupid crap that doesn’t mean anything… he says…”
“You’re right,” I said, cutting off her flow. “Sometimes I am sad. Sometimes I’m lonely, too. I know sadness, Helen, I know how it feels to be alone, and unseen. I know how it feels to be misunderstood, and outside the circle, I know how it feels when those around you want you to be anyone but yourself.”
“It’s just my dad really,” she said. “He’s so… practical. Everything has to be solid, black or white.”
“My father wanted me to be an accountant,” I shared. “Roberts and sons of Bristol, quite a prestigious firm. Only it’s Roberts and sons minus one son, the youngest. The boy who understood colours a lot better than he understood numbers. I never saw the magic in numbers, I never found satisfaction in regimented order.”
“Me, neither. My dad drives buses. He gets from A to B, on time. That’s his job, keeping order, keeping to the route. He enjoys the routine of it, says an orderly mind makes for an orderly life.” She smirked. “Time waits for no man, a good sense of timekeeping is an asset, Helen, nobody likes to be kept waiting.”
“That’s true enough.”
She nodded. “It’s true enough, but what fun is there in order? In keeping the status quo?”
“You’re asking the wrong person.”
“What’s life without risk, right? I think life is about experience… about the extremes… that’s where I think the soul thrives. What do you think?”
“I think you have a very gifted and colourful life ahead of you, Helen.”
“You do?”
“Yes, I do.”
Her eyes twinkled. “What about your mum? Did she like numbers, too?”
“Not so much. She was more for people than money, she was a nurse. For the love of it, not the salary. My father earned plenty enough for all of us. He’d go to church every Sunday, for the public face more than anything else, but he found his God in the stock market. My brothers, too.”
“My mum is in care work. She looks after the old folk down at Hawthorn House.”
“And does she also think you need to keep your feet on the ground?”
Helen shrugged. “I dunno, she thinks whatever Dad thinks, most of the time, anyway. Sometimes she changes his mind though, when he’s being mean.”
“My mother saved my backside from the belt a few times. I’d have taken a lot worse without her intervention.”
“My dad has never hit me, he just moans.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” I checked my watch. “You need to be home for six? If so, we’ll have to leave soon.”
“No…” Her tone was so eager. Cute and eager. “It’s no problem. They’ll put mine in the oven… and I can heat it up later, no big deal… unless, unless you need to be somewhere…”
I should’ve said yes. Should’ve made my excuses and driven her straight back to real life, where I was her teacher and this was nothing. “No,” I said. “I don’t.” I lit another cigarette to keep my hands busy. “So, what else? What else do you see?”
She turned to face me, hitching her leg up on the rock and gracing me with a view of her thigh, almost up to her crotch. She didn’t notice, and I tried not to look, but her skin was so pale and so beautiful. It would have been so easy to touch her, so very easy. I made myself focus on her words. “I see the way you love art, the way you love the masters, the beauty you see in everything. You see things that I see. Sometimes I see something beautiful, something that inspires me, even something simple and ordinary that other people overlook. A play of shadow in the art room, the texture of spilled paint, the gleam of light in a water glass… and then I see you’ve seen it, too.”
“We share an artistic eye.”
“Earlier you said it was more than that,” she whispered, and she was nervous again, her eyes darting to her lap and she hitched her skirt down. “What did you mean?”
“I meant we’re cut from similar cloth,” I said. “It’s not just the artistic eye, it’s the way of viewing the world. You could cut through the differences, the personality traits, the life history, even the age gap, and what you’d have left is the same creative current running through us both. That’s what I meant. That’s how I see it.”
“So, we are friends, right, Mr Roberts? That’s what it means?”
The hopefulness in her eyes gave me shivers, and my cock thumped afresh. She shifted her legs, and her goose-pimpled shin pressed against my thigh. I swallowed before succumbing to the inevitable, crossing another line that should never be crossed.
“It’s Mark,” I said. “You should call me Mark.”
***
Helen
Mark. Mark Roberts. Mark, Mark, Mark.
Kiss me, Mark. Touch me, Mark. That feels so good, Mark.
I love you, Mark.
I’m in love with you, Mark.
“That’s going to take some getting used to,” I said, and I was smiling. I couldn’t stop smiling.
“Don’t get too used to it. I’ll still have to be Mr Roberts in school time.”
My heart fluttered at the implication. In school time. I daren’t even dream, daren’t hope, but my spirit was soaring, here in this special place, this secret place, with Mark. Mark. My smile must have spoken volumes.
“What?” he said. “It’s just a name, Helen.” But he was smiling, too. “I’m glad it pleases you.”
“It does. I like it, Mark.”
He laughed. “That actually sounds quite strange. Fewer and fewer people call me Mark these days, it seems.”
“Why?” The question tumbled out.
He shrugged. “I guess it means I see more and more people in school, and less outside of it. That, or I’m becoming an increasingly grumpy old bastard and nobody wants to speak with me anymore.”
“I don’t believe that.” The breeze picked up again and I pulled my shins towards me, rubbed them with my palms.
“Give it time.”
I’d give it all the time in the world, and it wouldn’t matter. His eyes caught the last of the sun, reflected it back to me, and his irises were so blue. Like the summer sky on still water. His features were so strong… so dark… so… beautiful. My skin still burned from his touch, from the strength of his grip as he’d helped me over the fence. I wish I’d have fallen, tripped on the railing and toppled into his arms, and he’d have caught me and held me tight. I wished he was still touching me. I wished the world was full of fences and he’d have to help me over every single one for the rest of time.
And more, I wished for so much more than that.
I was still rubbing my knees and I hadn’t even noticed. He pulled a face, and I stopped, but it was too late.
“Are you cold? We should leave, I didn’t realise you were getting a chill.”
“I’m not…” I lied. “I’m good. It’s not even cold.” A gust of wind caught my hair before the words had even left my lips.
“You need to watch it with the lying,” he chided, but his eyes were smiling. “You’ll grow a nose like Pinocchio.”
“I just… like it here�
�� I don’t want to go yet…” I admitted. “Please…”
“Then take this.” He made to shrug his jacket off, but I put a hand on his arm.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Here. Let me.” His hands reached for my ankles and pulled them across his lap, and my tummy wriggled and tickled and my breath felt heavy in my throat. His thighs were warm through his trousers, but not as warm as his fingers as they rubbed my skin. I stared transfixed, watching him touching me, Mr Roberts actually touching me. And then my legs weren’t cold anymore. None of me was cold. And there were more tickles inside. Hot tickles that made me ache to slip my hand between my legs, where it feels so nice. Or his hand. The thought made my breath stop, made the world spin. Mr Roberts touching me. “Better?”
“Much… thanks.” In my head I saw Lizzie, open-mouthed, hands frantic as she urged me to seize the moment and be seductive. I wished I was her, wished I had her confidence, and her sexiness. But I was only me. I rested my weight on my hands, and tipped my shoulders back, displaying breasts I didn’t really have until I felt too shy and sat up again, but he didn’t seem to notice anyway. His gaze was on his hands and my skinny little goose-pimply legs. “I love it here. It’s nice… and it’s nice to talk… it’s nice to have someone… someone who understands…”
“Yes, it is.”
“Do you talk? I mean, do you… have someone? Sorry, I shouldn’t… I just never asked before…” My heart thumped, as though the wrong answer would toss me into the wind, and I’d break into tiny slivers of glass.
He paused for a long time. A long, long time, but his hands didn’t stop moving. “No. Not anymore.”
Oh, the relief. It flooded me and fuelled me, and I wanted to pry, dig my way under his skin, until I found the soul of Mr Roberts. Of Mark. His fingers felt so good, and I felt so bad, daring to part my knees just a little, wishing wishing wishing he’d move his hand up my thigh. Wishing he’d put his fingers between my legs, where I was fluttery and wet and needy and it was all for him. Please touch me.